Wendy Rose: Searching Through Shards, Creating Life

Abstract

In recent years preservation of sacred Native American burial sites has received renewed attention. Such sites have suffered various threats: modern highway or urban construction, careless artifact seekers, even university anthropology programs. Grave robbers are not the only threat. Anthropologists themselves must ask when it is appropriate to explore graves as archaeological sites, and does it matter whether the graves are those of Native Americans or of white people. These are not new questions but a new sensitivity to the questions is appearing. (We seldom dig up graves of New England Calvinists in the name of archaeological necessity; yet we seem to attack Indian graves of lesser antiquity.)l Wendy Rose, as a Native American anthropologist and poet, addresses this particular confrontation because it is of direct personal, professional, and tribal importance to her while at the same time she engages the more universal problems of fragmentation vs healing unity of her (and our) world. Although, as she has said, she is not that kind of anthropologist (she is a social anthropologist rather than historical), she meets the problem in the profession generally. Rose highlights the need for both understanding and sensitizing with the epigraphs preceding each section of her major collection, Lost Collection. Two epigraphs to Part I may serve as illustrations: ...you tell people where a site is, and they start to dig it...and the only thing they are looking for...is arrowheads and beads. And some people like to collect skulls. (Archaeologists, 1972) For sale: American Indian skull, guaranteed authentic. Good condition, $300 or best offer... (published ad, 1972). At the 1982 MLA Convention in Los Angeles, Wendy Rose, interviewed by Carol Hunter, identified the world she faced at that time: There's a bookstore in San Francisco that is famous for selling alternative literatures, especially 'beat' literature. Literary people come from all over the world to go there. I'm talking about 'City Lights.' I went in there and I asked for The Names, by N. Scott Momaday, the year it came out. After looking around without success, I asked the clerk who told me to check 'anthropology.' I did and, although that book wasn't there, the section was full of poetry and fiction by Native authors who were not anthropolgists. Scott Momaday was there, along with Leslie Silko, Simon Ortiz, and others. I returned to the clerk and pointed out that there were a lot of books shelved in the wrong section. He said that Indian authors belong in anthropology no matter what they wrote. We wound up arguing and he ordered me out of the store (43). As poet, Wendy Rose helps prove that Native writers are creating art rather than merely writing anthropological description. Scholars speak of her stunning visual imagery (Wiget 102) and of the counterpoint between formal diction and a sarcastic tone (102). In the introduction to Lost Copper, Scott Momaday describes her poetry as a hawk's shadow that glides upon the canyon wall:...the shadows of language upon the substance of earth (ix). The figure seems akin to Frank Lloyd Wright's illustration of structural with a sliding knot; the shape sliding along several lengths of rope of different composition keeps its integrity in spite of the changes of substance. The key to Rose's poetry is movement (suggested by both the shadow and the sliding knot). Sliding (or sometimes jostling) across time and place, Rose's poems, like Wright's sliding know, create an aesthetic with universal ideas sliding from the past through present situations, giving artistic coherence to fragments. Phenomena cohere for people in a manner which for them, in their particular cultural milieu, saves the appearances.2 If unaware of differences in the perception of phenomena a modern Angloamerican reader may make assumptions from his or her own technological